ALLoT (A Long List of Things)

2014 | 90 minutes

High school is where life starts to get serious. You are becoming the person you were meant to be, and you dream about what you will do. Forty years later – almost a lifetime – what happened? Did things work out the way you imagined? Are you where you want to be? And after all that time – who are you? How are you doing in the performance of your life?

Filmmaker John Sanborn made discoveries by attending his 40th high school reunion with a film crew to interview former classmates, find answers to those questions, and gain a measure of closure. The result is a highly personal video memoir that blends interviews with contemplations and meditations on the unpredictable challenges and life-altering transformations fifteen graduates from Walt Whitman High School faced in the years before they all met again.

the 3 versions of sanborn

​​As with any good memoir, who I am in the story is a character like myself, but something more. Something disruptive and injected into the memories of me and my clasmates and to question what's real and what is remembered. To do this I will be played by 3 forms. My daughter Miranda as my young, innocent self. And Thais Schwab as my angry alter-ego. And me as, well, me.

the agony of architecture​​

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Down that hallway, or around that corner lies my past. The walls are a different color but this is where my dreams take place - those scary ones where I am running for a class I will never find, and the halls are filling with water.

Yes, the nightmares started here.

fragments of memories

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Try as I might, I cannot rmember much of High School, including many of the people at the reunion (some of whom we interviewed) but they all remember me. What is real and what is a story produced by the filter of memory?

And how does it feel to be closer to the end, than to the begining?

my classmates (from long ago)

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I know some of these people really well, and I am still in touch with a few. But others I had not spoken to in 40 years - a lifetime. We all started in the same place, handed the same 3 act script - how well did we perform this role of a lifetime... let's find out.

I asked about the past, I asked about their lives and they told me the truth and what I wanted to hear.